Anna is watching (some of) you…
Source: dawn
THE comparison between this year’s remarkable Arab uprisings and the recent popular upsurge in India falters in one vital respect: barring the aberration of Indira Gandhi’s emergency in the mid-1970s, Indian democracy has remained intact since independence.
That is indeed a creditable achievement in the South Asian context.
Yet the extent to which elected legislators are in fact representative of the electors has once more been brought into question by the anti-corruption campaign spearheaded by the septuagenarian Anna Hazare, which has lately attracted a substantial following, particularly among the young.
Alarmed by the popular support galvanised by the Hazare phenomenon, the political classes have accused him of conspiring to subvert democracy through blackmail. At the same time, others have criticised the movement for relying more or less exclusively on moral precepts and lacking a political dimension.
Neither of the critiques is completely invalid. In ideal circumstances, systems of popular representation ought to render superfluous the need for agitation on the streets. But that is seldom the case anywhere in the world, and extra-parliamentary opposition is often perfectly legitimate in circumstances where legislators inadequately reflect popular aspirations. Given that India’s parliament has struggled for decades to come up with coherent anti-corruption legislation, popular pressure can hardly be deemed an unacceptable excess.
Both Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress party general secretary Rahul Gandhi have, in recent weeks, praised Hazare’s lofty aspirations while condemning his methods. The veteran campaigner’s Gandhian hunger strike has been described as undemocratically coercive. Quite a few Indians appear to believe that this sort of coercion is liable to do more good than harm, the assumption being that legislators would be disinclined to take action unless they are pushed. A significant corollary in this respect, of course, is that all too many legislators are themselves mired in corruption and tend to serve not their electors but the vested interests that keep them in clover.
According to some commentators, even the reaction to the Hazare phenomenon has been guided by mundane political considerations, notably the determination to elevate the fourth generation of the Nehru family to the helm of the Congress ahead of the next general election.
Whatever the validity of that observation, it is certainly true that the ruling party has been rattled, and while its more prominent leaders have been careful not to target Hazare personally, relatively minor Congress spokesmen have accused him of corruption and of consorting with right-wing nationalists.
Whatever the validity of such accusations, they are likely to be construed as a smear campaign. And whereas it is no doubt true that the Hazare movement has largely sought to occupy the moral high ground, its political consequences are reasonably obvious. Whether its determination to obtain legislative sanction for a powerful ombudsman holds the key to a panacea is certainly debatable, but it can certainly be commended for highlighting a phenomenon that grates on the Indian
consciousness, and for giving hope to those who have grown used to corruption and had until recently been liable to see it as an unavoidable evil.
If the campaign is perceived as apolitical, it’s partly because none of the mainstream political parties has lately taken up cudgels on behalf of the victims of corruption, even if that description encompasses pretty much the entire population.
It isn’t by any means an exclusively Indian problem, of course. The level of corruption in Pakistan is, if anything, even worse, even though it often gets sidelined in the national dialogue because other issues are deemed to pose a bigger existential threat.
According to Transparency International’s research director Robin Hodess, “India is comparable to China, doing better than Russia, less well in Brazil. But bureaucratic and petty corruption is extreme in India”.
It starts at the lowest tier of officialdom, as in Pakistan, and is often explained away by the fact that wages at this level of the scale are untenably low. But then, the people preyed upon are often even worse off. At the other end of the spectrum, there are instances such as the telecommunications licence scam and the allegations of fraud related to the Commonwealth Games.
However, it is invariably the smaller everyday infractions that generate the greatest ire. The Guardian’s Jason Burke quotes a 30-year-old software engineer, Varun Mishra, as complaining: “You pay for a birth certificate, a death certificate. All your life you pay. And for what? For things that should be free.”
India is often cited as one of the biggest economic success stories of the 21st century, alongside China and Brazil. What is often overlooked, and by no means only in India’s case, is that the impressive trajectory of growth is all too often also a tale of uneven development. An expansion of the middle class — a dream-come-true for those who cater to consumerism — doesn’t necessarily mean a decrease in the disparities of wealth. The rise in the number of billionaires testifies more than anything else to the triumph of crony capitalism.
The high priests of economic liberalism see nothing particularly wrong with the creation of immense wealth by the few at the expense of the many — which is, broadly speaking, the way of the world — but the inability to recognise the link between corruption on a massive scale and its petty variants effectively means that the phenomenon will endure.
In the Indian context, although it was the government’s willingness to compromise that led Hazare to end his hunger strike, the likelihood is that effective measures to curtail the scourge will remain elusive. An effective watchdog would be most welcome — and a worthy example for other nations with similar symptoms — but chances are that in the absence of systemic political and social reforms, efforts to assuage popular angst won’t proceed far beyond cosmetic changes, at best.
The BBC’s Soutik Biswas describes Hazare’s movement as “a much-needed reality check for India” and “the beginning of a long struggle against corruption, which has sunk very deep roots in one of the world’s most unequal and hierarchical societies”. I hope he’s right, but I have my doubts.
mahir.dawn@gmail.com
THE comparison between this year’s remarkable Arab uprisings and the recent popular upsurge in India falters in one vital respect: barring the aberration of Indira Gandhi’s emergency in the mid-1970s, Indian democracy has remained intact since independence.
That is indeed a creditable achievement in the South Asian context.
Yet the extent to which elected legislators are in fact representative of the electors has once more been brought into question by the anti-corruption campaign spearheaded by the septuagenarian Anna Hazare, which has lately attracted a substantial following, particularly among the young.
Alarmed by the popular support galvanised by the Hazare phenomenon, the political classes have accused him of conspiring to subvert democracy through blackmail. At the same time, others have criticised the movement for relying more or less exclusively on moral precepts and lacking a political dimension.
Neither of the critiques is completely invalid. In ideal circumstances, systems of popular representation ought to render superfluous the need for agitation on the streets. But that is seldom the case anywhere in the world, and extra-parliamentary opposition is often perfectly legitimate in circumstances where legislators inadequately reflect popular aspirations. Given that India’s parliament has struggled for decades to come up with coherent anti-corruption legislation, popular pressure can hardly be deemed an unacceptable excess.
Both Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress party general secretary Rahul Gandhi have, in recent weeks, praised Hazare’s lofty aspirations while condemning his methods. The veteran campaigner’s Gandhian hunger strike has been described as undemocratically coercive. Quite a few Indians appear to believe that this sort of coercion is liable to do more good than harm, the assumption being that legislators would be disinclined to take action unless they are pushed. A significant corollary in this respect, of course, is that all too many legislators are themselves mired in corruption and tend to serve not their electors but the vested interests that keep them in clover.
According to some commentators, even the reaction to the Hazare phenomenon has been guided by mundane political considerations, notably the determination to elevate the fourth generation of the Nehru family to the helm of the Congress ahead of the next general election.
Whatever the validity of that observation, it is certainly true that the ruling party has been rattled, and while its more prominent leaders have been careful not to target Hazare personally, relatively minor Congress spokesmen have accused him of corruption and of consorting with right-wing nationalists.
Whatever the validity of such accusations, they are likely to be construed as a smear campaign. And whereas it is no doubt true that the Hazare movement has largely sought to occupy the moral high ground, its political consequences are reasonably obvious. Whether its determination to obtain legislative sanction for a powerful ombudsman holds the key to a panacea is certainly debatable, but it can certainly be commended for highlighting a phenomenon that grates on the Indian
consciousness, and for giving hope to those who have grown used to corruption and had until recently been liable to see it as an unavoidable evil.
If the campaign is perceived as apolitical, it’s partly because none of the mainstream political parties has lately taken up cudgels on behalf of the victims of corruption, even if that description encompasses pretty much the entire population.
It isn’t by any means an exclusively Indian problem, of course. The level of corruption in Pakistan is, if anything, even worse, even though it often gets sidelined in the national dialogue because other issues are deemed to pose a bigger existential threat.
According to Transparency International’s research director Robin Hodess, “India is comparable to China, doing better than Russia, less well in Brazil. But bureaucratic and petty corruption is extreme in India”.
It starts at the lowest tier of officialdom, as in Pakistan, and is often explained away by the fact that wages at this level of the scale are untenably low. But then, the people preyed upon are often even worse off. At the other end of the spectrum, there are instances such as the telecommunications licence scam and the allegations of fraud related to the Commonwealth Games.
However, it is invariably the smaller everyday infractions that generate the greatest ire. The Guardian’s Jason Burke quotes a 30-year-old software engineer, Varun Mishra, as complaining: “You pay for a birth certificate, a death certificate. All your life you pay. And for what? For things that should be free.”
India is often cited as one of the biggest economic success stories of the 21st century, alongside China and Brazil. What is often overlooked, and by no means only in India’s case, is that the impressive trajectory of growth is all too often also a tale of uneven development. An expansion of the middle class — a dream-come-true for those who cater to consumerism — doesn’t necessarily mean a decrease in the disparities of wealth. The rise in the number of billionaires testifies more than anything else to the triumph of crony capitalism.
The high priests of economic liberalism see nothing particularly wrong with the creation of immense wealth by the few at the expense of the many — which is, broadly speaking, the way of the world — but the inability to recognise the link between corruption on a massive scale and its petty variants effectively means that the phenomenon will endure.
In the Indian context, although it was the government’s willingness to compromise that led Hazare to end his hunger strike, the likelihood is that effective measures to curtail the scourge will remain elusive. An effective watchdog would be most welcome — and a worthy example for other nations with similar symptoms — but chances are that in the absence of systemic political and social reforms, efforts to assuage popular angst won’t proceed far beyond cosmetic changes, at best.
The BBC’s Soutik Biswas describes Hazare’s movement as “a much-needed reality check for India” and “the beginning of a long struggle against corruption, which has sunk very deep roots in one of the world’s most unequal and hierarchical societies”. I hope he’s right, but I have my doubts.
mahir.dawn@gmail.com
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